Women's participation and gender equality in sustainable ecotourism: A bibliometric analysis

Ecotourism has the potential to uplift women's lives by relieving them from strenuous physical labour and improving their economic status. It also empowers them in cultural leadership roles and enhances their social standing while fostering gender equality. Therefore, bibliometric analysis has been used in the current study to quantitatively evaluate the interlinkage between ecotourism, gender roles, and women empowerment. From 2002 to 2022, 1026 research publications from the Scopus database have been analyzed using the popular bibliometric software VOSviewer. The published papers have been analyzed using bibliometric parameters (bibliographic, co-citation, co-authorship, and co-occurrence analyses). Based on the data, it is clear that studies examining the effects of ecotourism on women's empowerment and gender equality are rapidly becoming more prominent with the rising trend of annual publications as well as citations. The United Kingdom, the United States, China, Australia, and South Africa produce the most publications in this research. Gender equality and women empowerment as pertinent study issues are acquiring appropriate relevance in ecotourism owing to its in-depth and focused discussion of empowerment, participation, and entrepreneurship in achieving the fifth sustainable development goal (SDG). Our study shows that experts all around the globe are interested in the complex problems of gender stereotypes, traditional social norms, pull and push components of participation, and institutional challenges related to ecotourism and women's empowerment.